Bones, blood and Bowie

Going out for a fancy French dinner isn’t a standard Halloween activity. Maybe German, with the whole Gothic, Rammstein, creepy Nosferatu thing. But it’s hard to imagine Jean-Paul Sartre dressed as the Wolfman, or Jacques Chirac giving out candy to children.

That said, I chose Cremant, a Madrona eatery, as my Halloween milieu for one very good, very ghoulish offering: “Bones and Blood.”

I could not deprive my readers of blood sausage and oven-roasted calf bones. Yes, you’re very welcome.

Scott Emerick, cool as a cucumber. Scott opened Cremant three years ago with his wife Tanya. Both Seattlites, they never met until they were both living in Paris. Ah.

To be honest, I just wanted to try bone marrow myself. I’d seen it on “No Reservations,” read about it online, and its primeval flair appealed to me. By all accounts, bone marrow has been eaten in Europe forever, and it’s a workaday food. Waste not, want not.

Blood sausage isn’t new to me. I had it with chao long, which you can read about in my previous post. I enjoyed the Vietnamese version; now it was time to try classic French boudin noir.

It started out as a wholesome evening, going on a double-date in sleepy, family-friendly Madrona with my girlfriend Kristin, my childhood friend Scott and his girlfriend, Tsuyuko. I wondered, was this the Halloween equivalent of white flight, what old people do to avoid freaks and drunken hooligans on All Hallows Eve?

It turned out that Cremant was no wholesome, suburban refuge for the hesitant city dweller. Initially, it did seem like a quaint cottage inn with its old-fashioned wallpaper and white tablecloths. But as the host was asking for the name on the reservation, I heard something. Cremant was playing “Ziggy Stardust,” the centerpiece album of David Bowie’s cocaine-fueled, gender-bending, 70s persona.

“We were listening to Bauhaus earlier,” the maitre d’ reported. “But it started to get a little too loud for people to hear each other.”

Gothic punk in a French restaurant? Maybe the Germans didn’t have a monopoly on angst-ridden weirdness after all.

Tired of being sane, clear-headed and alive? Come on down to the Cremant Absinthe Bar

And then there was the absinthe bar. Absinthe will probably forever bear the guilt as the hallucinogenic swill that drove a generation of artists to madness and death. Cremant was clearly capitalizing on the “dark intrigue” factor with a decorative sign advertising Van Gogh’s suicide juice.

I requested a behind-the-scenes, so I could see how blood and bones were prepared. There wasn’t much to it. The shank bones went into the oven raw, without seasoning or sauce. The same went for the blood sausage.

No marrow escape for these bones — on their way to the big roaster in the sky

Chef Scott Emerick, who learned his trade at a Paris cooking school, explained that the links were made in-house with pork blood, chestnut flour and diced onions.

Pretty anti-climatic. And no kitchen nightmares at Cremant. Civil, neat and orderly; Seattle all the way.

I could almost say the same for the bones. They were about as inoffensive as it gets. The jiggly bone marrow, spread onto grilled baguette, reminded me of a recent breakfast of poached eggs and toast. But sprinkled with fleur de sel, a sharp French sea salt, the os a moelle roti triumphed over any morning meal I could ever prepare. Emerick described the marrow as “meat-flavored butter.” He also said that, in his Parisian days, marrow was the perfect snack on the way home from the bar.

To me, buttering your bread with something scooped out of two real animal bones, standing on end at the table, is just way cooler then getting it out of a butter dish or a plastic tub. Each slather was like a mini Satanic ritual.

Butter bell, gone to hell. Sausage on the side. Wouldn’t those bones make great candle holders?

The “Blood” portion, though less striking, offered more complex flavors. The simple sausage of blood, flour and onions was moist, almost fluffy, but without the grease of a standard link. Bready rather than springy, the boudin noir was like stuffing in a tube. Served over a pillow of atomically-whipped yet buttery mashed potatoes, I could almost smell Thanksgiving in the air.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It was still Halloween. And Bowie, perpetually celebrating the holiday with one makeover to the next, went from background music to live action when a Ziggy Stardust impersonator entered Cremant halfway through the meal.

Clad in black tights and sequined halter top, sporting an auburn Glam mullet and facial lightning bolt lifted right from the “Aladdin Sane” cover, Portland artist Leiv Fagereng reassured me that I had not sheltered myself from the Bacchanalian exuberance of Halloween by spending the holiday in a Madrona bistro.

Absinthe: the last thing David Bowie needs

Cremant, with its Bowie, absinthe and roasted bones provided a comfortable niche in the darkness. Maybe it was too safe, but who cares? Cremant got some well-deserved business. I didn’t have to deal with drunken revelers, and I got to eat delicious, interesting food with good people.

Happy Halloween.

If you’re into “arting weird,” check out the work of Leiv Fagereng, former Seattle waiter and current Portland painter. It’s surreal, explicit and full of Twin Peaks motifs — owls, evergreens and mac trucks approaching along dark highways.